In addition to the email and phone metadata the U.S. government is tracking, the feds also have an eye on your regular old snail mail, which is actually a "treasure trove of information," according to a former FBI agent who used to work with the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, as it's called.

For future reference, we've created a handy guide to making sure you never get an important video-chat interrupted by notification boxes mid-call. Despite the protestations of attorneys and Judge Debra Nelson, what happened to Professor Rich Mantei during his testimony on live TV on Friday did not have to happen and hopefully will never happen again. Here's how.

In response to five different petitions from sane people asking the White House to recognize the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group, the administration has released this passive-aggressive GIF map, showing the source of signatures from across the country for one of the most popular petitions in the history of the "We the People" site.

Yelp has released a fun, addictive map geo-locating aggregate keywords from all of its user review data in 14 top cities, a tool that finally resolves the age-old debate over which American city is the most hipster of them all.

"How do you know when you're too sexy for work?" That's the question Businessweek had for Jolie Anne O'Dell, a tech blogger for VentureBeat, because obviously the first step to making it in the tech blogging business is looking the exact right amount of sexy.

Three months after the Stanford community showered Clinkle with vague praise in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, and after a mysterious round of funding arrived without the founders saying much about what their startup even does, we have some intel on the magnet to all that money: something called Aerolink.

Less than six months after getting fired from the company he started, Andrew Mason has come out with an album about making it in the business world. We listened to the entire thing so you don't have to, then picked out the best parts. You're welcome.

In case you hadn't heard, Zynga is totally falling apart, but the head of Xbox doesn't care because the butt of all of social-gaming startup jokes is located in San Francisco's hip, sunny Mission district, not Microsoft's dreary, awful Redmond, Washington. And, you know, because he might be its next CEO.

In addition to a Father's Day hospital hello from Steve Wozniak, Kim Kardashian got her man an authentic signed Jobs collector's item that could go for a lot on eBay, Kanye told the world on Monday. But that's nothing to Kimye. No, this is about something else.

Despite all the talk about the "disappointing" cicada season that was "canceled" because of evil urban development, scientists now insist that this year's horny insects "had a pretty good year." And all entomology aside, the trackers have shown a mini-swarm as the 17-year seasonal phenomenon moves past its peak.

It has become an accepted rite of planning for brides and grooms to craft a quirky phrase or mash-up of their names, all the better — if not necessary — for their friends turned free wedding photographers to use on Instagram, creating an easily (if sometimes awkwardly) organized filtered album. We talked to some Instawedding veterans.

Clearly the couch-potato image of Bert and his long-time Sesame Street roommate have unleashed some deeper emotions that were hiding in the pundit cage in the days following the Court's rulings on Wednesday. This furor over a New Yorker cover picked up from some guy's Tumblr must mean something, right? Right? We investigate the Friday psychosis of a historic week.

Even though Bert and Ernie officially aren't gay, next week's cover of The New Yorker features Sesame Street's not-gay gay cultural icons celebrating this week's Supreme Court rulings, which is sweet if you don't overthink it: America's most famous men in love finally have the official acceptance of America.

If the grand history of Newt Gingrich knowing the future is any indication, this techno-politician's endorsement means the wearable face computer will go from niche Glasshole hobby to product of the masses.

The so-called StellarWind program described in the latest Edward Snowden leak is way more invasive than the phone-call metadata spying. For a sense of how NSA's email collection worked — and how much IP addresses can tell a spy about a person, even if he's not reading the contents of your email — we take a look at the guts of an everyday email.

That's pretty low if you founded the fifth most visited website on the planet, and only pretty good if you were a CEO in 1965. Nonetheless, Wikipedia chief Jimmy Wales just barely cracks six figures in total net worth, despite the 20 billion page views behind his do-gooder website.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia invoked a curious term in his fierce dissent of Wednesday's ruling that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, calling it a "legalistic argle-bargle," which sounds like a made up word if we've ever heard one, but was actually a carefully chosen phrase of disgust.

Sure, these of-the-moment recordings aren't the most beautiful, but they capture brief moments of joy, as they unfolded — they're filtered, but they are emotionally filter-free. And that, today, is beautiful.

Since the leaks began three weeks ago today, the most active group in the terror network has reportedly — and predictably — started tweaking the way it communicates, but in a way the doesn't necessarily make it harder for the NSA to track them.

Honey flavored whiskey may be a threat to the manlihood of purists, but if trend stories and staggering data on the quickly emerging market are to be believed, even the manliest of drinkers should know that real men, these days, drink syrupy hooch.

WiFi in the skies costs too much and goes unused, but the world's airplane Internet market leader doesn't care, because the recently IPO'd company has more airplanes equipped with wireless than anyone else in a connected sector that's burgeoning... and fast.

Apple's second attempt at its new iPhone operating system presents a frightening problem for Snapchat users, with a new screenshot feature that, as of right now, makes it possible for creepy users to capture Snaps before they vanish, which totally ruins the point of one of the most popular apps in existence.

Don't be fooled by the perks at all those Silicon Valley (and Alley) offices—it's all just part of a subtle plot to control office culture. How the so-called "escalation of perks" keeps employees in line all over the tech world and at "progressive" companies the world over.